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New York sues Valve for 'letting children and adults illegally gamble' with loot boxes (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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The lawsuit aims to "stop Valve from promoting gambling features in its games, disgorge all ill-gotten gains, and pay fines for violating New York\u2019s laws."

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[–] 10 points 6 months ago (11 children)

Loot boxes have been illegal in my country for quite some years now.

For CS I can't buy any keys and open the boxes but I can buy the weapons on the market.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (10 children)

    Can you sell, or only buy?

    Because trading is still a form of gambling.

    Also, curious what country you're from.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Where in the world trading is a form of gambling?

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Some people buy with the intent to sell later and turn a profit, like stock trading, is what I meant.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Trading is completelly different thing. There is risk of loosing money when selling or buying at the wrong time, but the product is still allways there and you have the opportunity to appraise the price of what ever you are trading.

    In gambling there is promise of payout, but you have no way of knowing what you are getting.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    I can sell and buy. I'm from a country in the EU.

    And yeah, I can still "play the markets". And I can also trade with those shady gambling services.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (5 children)

    The EU! That's surprising that there's that limitation. Do you know why that restriction is there? Is Valve the one imposing that restriction, your country, the EU? Or maybe you aren't old enough and there's protections? I'm curious.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (4 children)

    It's my country that chose to do it yes. And no, I'm old enough. Any sort of gambling requires the provider to have a gambling license (and it must be 18+).

    The lootboxes don't even need to provide something that can be sold for real money. As long as there is randomization it's gambling. Most games block such lootboxes from being sold in my country because it's the easiest for them. In Guild Wars 2 I can't even buy a lootbox that only contains untradeable armor dyes because it's randomized.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (3 children)

    Probably for the better? Not sure though.

    In gw2, I'm assuming you mean that you can't gain black lion keys?

    But you can buy gems?

    I like how if you can pay money and get something useful, it's shitty for the company to do and pay2win.

    But if you can pay money and it only be skins, it's shitty for the company and purely for addiction.

    But then if they can have value, now it's really gambling and trading?

    Yet we can pay money to play games which get us nothing and that's fine.

    The legal system still can't figure out digital goods, it seems. Not a criticism, just an observation. If it were easy, it would be solved and everyone would be happy.

    Maybe we should just listen to gamers. If it feels shitty, it is, and if it doesn't feel shitty, it isn't. But then also, we know that people in the throes of addiction don't always know they are.

    But also, why do we even ban gambling? To protect people from that which is an obvious abuse and manipulation of their senses to seal their money? Fair trade being allowed.

    So then why does the definition of gambling have anything to do with randomization? Would it be better or worse if there was no randomization? To me, that seems irrelevant.

    Ugh I'm getting too deep in this and society is starting to unravel. I'm starting to think about stuff like different geographic social contracts for how to medically research and agree on scientific findings, and how those do or don't eventually define law. Like your country may accept certain expectations of law structure and how close it's defined to the findings of whatever medical conventions you have, such as how addiction is formed and the level of social contract in result or even awareness of said findings. And also that much of games in general is randomized...

    Hmmmmm. I wish there was a good answer for this stuff.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    In gw2, I’m assuming you mean that you can’t gain black lion keys?

    But you can buy gems?

    You can gain them from map completion but you can't buy them using gems. Gems can be bought for IRL money though and used for anything that isn't randomized.

    But also, why do we even ban gambling? To protect people from that which is an obvious abuse and manipulation of their senses to seal their money? Fair trade being allowed.

    As I said, in my country it's not illegal or banned. I have gambled on local gambling websites before. It requires a business to have a gambling license here, which isn't something game companies seem to want. (I guess this would also set a precedent for other countries to tackle this sort of gambling.)

    So then why does the definition of gambling have anything to do with randomization? Would it be better or worse if there was no randomization? To me, that seems irrelevant.

    You can't gamble if there is only a single outcome.

    Hmmmmm. I wish there was a good answer for this stuff.

    Maybe ban any sort of IRL money purchases of anything that has randomization and borders on gambling. I guess if it gets banned in the EU and US the rest will probably follow.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    It would also have to have some sort of repeatability. If you only get one lootbox per account, even if it's random, I wouldn't consider it gambling.

    It brings me back to valve adding skins in. They probably wanted it to be random so people wouldn't just buy a handful of great looking skins but not the more normal ones. Honestly, if lootboxes were free and timegated and you only got one per day... Then the skin makers wouldn't get any money. Unless Valve hired them, which they probably don't want to do. But then also the game benefits from having high quality skins and they should just hire them.. but then fans can't really get involved in skinmaking.

    So give free crates at a slow rate, but sell cheaper keys with count and rate limits. But kids shouldn't be gambling.

    Soo... The free crates are random, the paid keys are more expensive and let you manually select from a set like in gw2 mount select license.

    That way, you can tie royalties to the set but give more to the skin that's chosen. And, since the money isn't spent on randomization, it isn't shitty gambling.

    Eh? Yeah? What do you think about that? See any flaws?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    As long as there isn't a game of chance when paying real money it's all perfectly fine. That's already how it is right now in GW2 for my country. You can't buy the keys to the lootboxes, but you can get them from map completion. And you can also just buy gems and get that mount skin license thingy.

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